I’ll get to the details, but start here: Stephen Harper’s lunch-hour event in Markham outside Toronto today should put a chill through the spine of any opposition politician watching.

In a brief announcement in a high-tech factory setting, the smiling and relaxed Conservative leader — freshly home from a trip to Senegal, showing no signs of fatigue, tricked up with a lapel microphone that allowed him to roam far from his podium while he read from notes on teleprompters — delivered news of high-technology bounty that would, he assured the handpicked and photogenic crowd arrayed behind him for the cameras, usher in a new era of prosperity and employment.

And then the president of the University of Toronto, Meric Gertler, went to the podium to offer Harper the thanks of a grateful university community. Within minutes, the presidents of other large universities were chiming in on Twitter with their own thanks. “A transformation for Canada,” Michelle Rempel, the minister for Western economic diversification, called it, also on the Twitter.

It would be difficult for another party leader to have a better day than Harper on the trail, if today were a campaign day. Which means that, in a sense, of course today was a campaign day. Harper’s performance today, coming on the heels of similar announcements on taxes, infrastructure and newborn health, could help explain why the polls are starting to look like this.

Now the details. Harper was announcing the implementation of a 2014 budget commitment, the creation of a Canada First Research Excellent Fund. It’s $1.5 billion over 10 years: it’ll take a few years to ramp up to $200 million in spending per year, country-wide. While the fun was proposed by, and is being cheered by, the big research universities of the so-called U15, the money will be available to all “post-secondary institutions” — roughly, universities plus polytechnic colleges — regardless of size. Here are the eligibility criteria. The big universities expect they’ll be able to get the lion’s share of CFREF funding. But they’ll need to fight for it.

A few observations. First, on scale. In 2013 I wrote about one of Harper’s biggest insights in government: that Canadians pay no attention to decimal places, so that $1 million spent on an issue is roughly as impressive to voters as $1 billion is. Two hundred million a year is welcome news and was definitely worth Meric Gertler’s time; but to hold that it will transform Canadian research, you need to ignore that $200 million is the amount the Commonwealth of Virginia spent on research over two recent years; or the amount Mort Zuckerman donated to Columbia University in 2012, or the amount philanthropist Geoff Cumming and the Alberta government recently gave to the University of Calgary. Or a little less than the Rogers family and the UofT recently set aside to set up a new heart disease research institute.

It’s real money, it will pay for serious research, and it is a real if partial rebuttal to the assumption, widespread among the Conservatives’ critics, that they are Neanderthals who would prefer that Canada be returned to the level of technological sophistication that it enjoyed in the Diefenbaker years. But on the scale of higher-education research in North America, it’s a top-up. And it comes in the context of a generalized flatlining of federal funding for research over the past eight years. Since research is funded, not only by central governments but by provinces, philanthropy and business, it’s worth looking at this chart from the same report, which shows that Canada is seriously underperforming against competitor countries in recent years.

Which leads to the other observation about the CFREF and everything else the Harper government is doing in science these days: it is carefully targeted, in ways that look clever and modern but are certainly self-defeating. This paragraph in today’s announcement:

Proposals will be required to align with the government of Canada’s updated ST&I priority research areas, released as part of its renewed ST&I Strategy: environment and agriculture; health and life sciences; natural resources and energy; information and communications technologies; and advanced manufacturing.

… along with further language in the eligibility criteria that state research projects will only be accepted if researchers can recruit private sector co-funders. This sort of stuff is everywhere: one of the rare and very rich Canada Excellence Research Chairs is reserved for a researcher in energy science, and lo and behold, the University of Calgary’s new CERC will devote his talents to finding clever ways to extract more oil from oil sands. That’s no crime. But the applications of scientific research are impossible to predict, and attempts to “aim” research outcomes almost inevitably simply restrict the kinds of research that end up getting done.

Thomas Edison would have had little luck inventing the light bulb if he had needed co-funding from candlemakers. Tony Pawson, one of Canada’s greatest researchers, found a massively lucrative class of molecules called protein kinase inhibitors — like, very large numbers of billions of dollars in market value — after spending decades asking questions about a turkey virus.

Now comes the news — not announced in spiffy Markham photo ops, but dug up by the CBC — that the Canada Institutes of Health Research’s constituent sub-groups will have their budgets cut in half, with the rest going into a common pool accessible only through co-funding deals. This sort of meddling is bad for science and not helpful for private sector research. The government’s own blue-chip advisory council keeps telling it the same thing. But the government can’t help itself: private sector research in this country is broken, and the Conservatives’ best answer is to break university research. I’m pretty sure some university presidents in this country would agree with me, if they weren’t locked into this weird dynamic where they have to thank the feds for every dollar, accompanied by strings of asterisks and footnotes, they can get.

Hard to believe just how many Canadians get suckered by this government’s scheming and manipulation. Clearly – as indicated by the sudden resurgence in CPC popularity – we have a lot of brain-dead, inattentive voters who like being bought with their own money and have no qualms about a government which consistently breaks election laws.

I am curious Paul, exactly how much of the billions of dollars of revenue which has flowed from Pawson’s protein inhibitor research ended up in this country? If it is none or nearly none, then you can see a bit of what the government is trying to do with its new research model.

In a slightly different vein the likely funders of Edison’s electric light research wouldn’t have been the candle makers, but the electricity companies who at the time were actively searching for new avenues to bring their “product” into people’s homes.

Yes. If no money from one of the most common pharmaceuticals classes in the world has landed in Canada, then what the government is doing makes sense. Here’s the new Pfizer HQ in Montreal. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t free:

As for electricity companies, the first public electrical generating station in the world was built four years after Edison’s first successful light bulb experiment, by Edison. To power his light bulbs. You could look it up.

Amazing that the heads of the big universities are excited but Paul Wells, who apparently really knows little about research in Canada, isn’t. I suspect he would be if this were a Liberal initiative.
The Federal Government gives huge tax breaks for entities to do research in Canada and, in spite of this, research done in Canada is sparse. But the reason for this is that the majority of businesses in Canada are American branch plants and the research is centered in the U.S. driven by efficiency and, yes, some parochialism. Beyond the current tax incentives the only thing left is to force entities based in Canada to do the majority of their research here. But I suspect that this would only result in fewer branch plants and the Canadian jobs they support. That kind of meddling is better left for the Liberals to muse about.

I wonder whether the Conservative government-appointed Science and Technology Advisory Council writes grumpy reports because it is pining for a Liberal government. Oh well. They apparently really know little about research in Canada.

This 2013 report is one of a stack as high as your head that say the branch-plant question is “a side issue” in research intensity.

Amazing that the heads of the big universities are excited but Paul Wells…

It seems to me that arguing that the positive reaction of cash-strapped University Presidents to a funding initiative indicates that they think that the initiative is a good way to address the research needs of universities is like arguing that Oliver Twist’s polite request for another bowl of gruel indicates that Twist felt that bowls of gruel were a good way to support the nutritional needs of orphans.

The logic is simple: cut off university funding to bare bones, then around election time, make some big annoucement about funding in Canada. Meanwhile, the support staff, ie, the technicians who maintain continuity of the equipment and also run maintenance, don’t get supported because they don’t have government funds.

At this very moment, I am at one of the big 3 universities, writing grants to support my research. Personally, I would be much better served by guaranteed funding and the guaranteed support (via staff) instead of spending all my time chasing grants. But, if I want to step up my research, I need money, and that is only found with additional funds.

Go into any university and see what they boon-bust funding models lead too: unused equipment because the money to support it isn’t there. I was part of the same thing while working in the US during the TARP. I ordered $100k worth of stuff then ended up being useless, because I only had 2 weeks to spec it.

Harper is not offering an either/or. Only part of the new or reallocated funding is with the new model.

Our university researchers are bad at commercialization of their research. Our companies don’t do much R&D. Under Liberal governments, the taxpayer ended up funding 100% of a phoney R&D credit program where most of the money went to consultants, not actual research.

So Harper puts a pot of money out there to tempt universities and companies to learn to dance with each other, where if they find a way to dance, twice as much money is spent on research, and the probability of commercialization and economic multipliers is much larger.

Stephen Harper is not a friend of science. Not even sort of. He has just discovered he likes photo ops where he looks like he’s explaining something to someone in a white lab coat. Makes him feel smart, I guess. The next set of campaign ads will have him wearing a lab coat himself-I’m sure the hard-hat crowd are going to feel betrayed.

While Thomas Edison certainly didn’t require co-funding from candle makers in order to develop his electric light bulb, its worth noting that he didn’t require government funding either.

His funding came from industry and private investors, as did the funding supplied to his direct competitor, Nicola Telsa and most of the other great inventors who developed and commercialized applications relating to the electric current around the end of the last century.

It might be time to stop pretending that the only way to invent and innovate is to ask the government for money.

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